Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 2/A cruise in a tub

​
A CRUISE IN A TUB.
Amid the varied improvements in naval architecture to which the latter half of the nineteenth century has given birth: at a time when a man-of-war may undergo so many alterations in the course of construction, that before she is launched all traces of the model on which she was designed are lost, there are still extant vessels with the distinguishing initials H.M.S. before their names, to which the profane are apt to apply the significant, if uncomplimentary epithet of “tub.” And in so doing, these scoffers may be considered merely to imply that the craft in question does not reach their ideas of perfection. But in the year 1782 the term “tub” possessed in the British Navy a more special signification. In the vocabulary of those days a tub was a ​forty-four-gun ship. She carried sixteen guns on her main, sixteen on her lower, and the remainder on her quarter-deck and forecastle.
Her build was similar to that which popular prejudice assigns to the aldermen of the City of London; for her claims to symmetry were materially affected by the undue proportion which her circumference bore to her length. Her sailing powers were those of a hay-stack. She went before the

Đọc bản gốc tại Wikisource tiếng Anh